The Velvet Glove eBook

The road that runs by the bank of the canal was deserted
when the Count de Sarrion turned his horse’s
head that way from the dusty high road leading southwards
out of Saragossa. Sarrion had only been in Saragossa
twenty-four hours. His great house on the Paseo
del Ebro had not been thrown open for this brief visit,
and he had been content to inhabit two rooms at the
back of the house. From the balcony of one he
had seen the incident related in the last chapter;
and as he rode towards the convent school he carried
in his hand—­not a whip—­but the
delicately-wrought sword-stick which had fallen from
the hand of Francisco de Mogente into the gutter the
night before.

In the grassy sedge that bordered the canal the frogs
were calling to each other with that conversational
note of interrogation in their throats which makes
their music one of Nature’s most sociable and
companionable sounds. In the fruit-trees on the
lower land the nightingales were singing as they only
sing in Spain. It was nearly dark, a warm evening
of late spring, and there was no wind. Amid the
thousand scents of blossom, of opening buds, and a
hundred flowering shrubs there arose the subtle, soft
odour of sluggish water, stirred by frogs, telling
of cool places beneath the trees where the weary and
the dusty might lie in oblivion till the morning.

The Count of Sarrion rode with a long stirrup, his
spare form, six feet in height, a straight line from
heel to shoulder. His seat in the saddle and
something in his manner, at once gentle and cold, something
mystic that attracted and yet held inexorably at arm’s
length, lent at once a deeper meaning to his name,
which assuredly had a Moorish ring in it. The
little town of Sarrion lies far to the south, on the
borders of Valencia, in the heart of the Moorish country.
And to look at the face of Ramon de Sarrion and of
his son, the still, brown-faced Marcos de Sarrion,
was to conjure up some old romance of that sun-scorched
height of the Javalambre, where history dates back
to centuries before Christ—­where assuredly
some Moslem maiden in the later time must have forsaken
all for love of a wild yet courteous Spanish knight
of Sarrion, bequeathing to her sons through all the
ages the deep, reflective eyes, the impenetrable dignity,
of her race.

Sarrion’s hair was gray. He wore a moustache
and imperial in the French fashion, and looked at
the world with the fierce eyes and somewhat of the
air of an eagle, which resemblance was further accentuated
by a finely-cut nose. As an old man he was picturesque.
He must have been very handsome in his youth.

It seemed that he was bound for the School of the
Sisters of the True Faith, for as he approached its
gate, built solidly within the thickness of the high
wall, without so much as a crack or crevice through
which the curious might peep, he drew rein, and sat
motionless on his well-trained horse, listening.
The clock at San Fernando immediately vouchsafed the
information that it was nine o’clock. There
was no one astir, no one on the road before or behind
him. Across the narrow canal was a bare field.
The convent wall bounded the view on the left hand.